The King's Gold (23 page)

“Let’s look—what the hell
does
he write in this thing?”

“I don’t think we should be eating while reading this.”

I coaxed a page from the red envelope. Pure white, the paper was illuminated with botanical watercolors of purple flowers, as well as Antonio Medici’s elaborate italic script.

“That’s always my problem.” Erik took another sip of the vin santo before he put all the plates onto the bed’s side table. “I always want to bathe, drink, read, and eat at the same time. It’s not very good for the books, but it is—”

“Heaven.”

“Exactly.” Pink flushed his cheeks; he wagged his tail like a Saint Bernard. “Hey. Hey you. Lola.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking...you know what I also feel like doing?”

“We just did that.”

“No,
not that. I feel like getting married.”

I smiled at him, not understanding. “We
are
, in—uh—it’s not
eleven
days now, is it?”

“At the stroke of midnight, make that ten.”

“Oh, God! We still have to figure out seventies, or eighties, fish or beef, scavenger hunt or no scavenger hunt—”

“No scavenger hunt. And let’s just forget all that. Let’s do it now. Here, in Siena.”

“Ah, I see.”

“We’ll
elope
—”

“But don’t you
want
to marry a woman dressed up like a cupcake in a Long Beach Hilton, while all your aunts get sloppy drunk?”

“Despite the fact that my lungs have been kebbabed and I need a good stiff shot of Paxil, I’m getting hot right now just hearing you talk about it—”

“Really?”

“No.
Look, I don’t want to wait anymore—I just got my ass burned off, and am probably on the pope’s most wanted list, and it’s making me a little sentimental. You know? I
love
you. Pretty desperately, as might be obvious by now! I’d like to get the old ‘you may now kiss your lawfully wedded wife’ business taken care of before I get blown up by antique Molotov cocktails or yanked off to an Italian gulag.”

“I know it’s been a rough couple of days—”

“Rough is not exactly how I’d describe it. I just think it’d be more romantic if we got a priest to do the wedding, here, tomorrow.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You are
not
the man I met two years ago—”

“What, when I had all those shiny undergraduates hanging all over me? When I was a womanizer and so ridiculously cheerful?”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Yes...All that tacky sex—was
definitely
overrated. In retrospect.” He flopped onto his back and flung out his arms. “And, of course, I’m
not
the same obnoxious pinhead I used to be. Remember what I told Dr. Riccardi in Florence. Love changes you for the better.” He deepened his voice, mock-serious. “You, my lovely Mexican, my goddess, my punishment for bad behavior—yes, you, Lola Sanchez, have made me a better...man—egads.”

“Oh, Erik!” I cackled, but tears sprang into my eyes at these words—even as he leaned up on an elbow, mumbling, “And plus
another
advantage is that if we get married now, I think it would hideously annoy Señor Orestes.”

I blinked, blinked again. “Who?”

“Orestes? From Euripides’ play—
Orestes
? Come on, you remember—the avenger of his father? Having a crack-up because of the Furies? Marco Moreno, I mean.”

“How does that play turn out again?”

“Orestes kills Clytemnestra for killing his father. Except that’s matricide. So after he does his duty, it’s time for
his
punishment—he winds up going bonkers from his persecution by the Furies. Happily Apollo sweeps down and saves him just in time.
El
deus ex machina. Most everybody else gets creamed, though.”

“Your point is?”

“Remember when Marco was pawing you
far
too much in the crypt and giving me such a seizure? I think he has a Charles Manson–sort of crush on you.”

“Okay, enough.” I put up my hands, palms first. “First, we’re getting married in Long Beach so that Manuel can give me away, and I can watch Yolanda clothesline all the boys who get too close to her on the dance floor. Second, we’re going to get back to the matter at hand.”

“You mean the letter.”

“That’s right.” I looked down at the page shining on the bed.

“I’m dying to read it.”

“All right, woman—we’ll table the elopement talk. But you can’t do a cartwheel in Italy without kicking a bishop, and I’m sure that plenty of these
padres
would be very happy to do us the honors—”

“Erik—”

He nodded energetically and pointed at the page. “Yes, my darling. Yes, my bossy love! Subject closed. Read, read, read. No more dallying.”

We both stared down at the handwritten paper.

Erik rubbed his hands together. “This
is
pretty exciting.”

I squinted at the script. “This looks like the first letter I saw—Marco’s letter.”

“It looks to me as if it has the same writing as the letter you showed me at the palazzo.”

“Which would mean it was written after he broke his hand.”

“Lola, you do it, your Italian’s better than mine.”

“Okay. So, Antonio, what do we have here...”

My Dear Nephew Cosimo,

If you are reading this missive, then you succeeded in escaping the symbol of my Beloved Sofia, the Dragon, as well as my naughtily shifted Elemental symbols.

Congratulations! Having survived to take up the challenges of City Three, you have earned that many additional hints, which will help you find the Treasure—but before I give you this Trinity of new Clues, nephew, allow me one more indulgence: I’d like to amuse you with a brief history of your long-sought Prize.

You already know that after my scientific career in Florence, and my ventures in Timbuktu, I helped Hernán Cortés vanquish Tenochtitlán in ’24. Like the other soldiers, I expected compensation—imagine my surprise when thirteen months after King Montezuma had handed us the Treasure, that measly, pox-ridden, beef-headed General commanded that a third part of his lucre be returned.

That terrible night was pierced by a full moon, I recall, and a bonefire had been lit, around which I, my Moorish slaveman, and the rest of the men took our ease with pulque. Cortés arrived to our little party with his pet Montezuma in tow, and at the sight of this Indian we grew instantly sober, for the half-dead man was dressed in rags, and his once-beautiful hair knotted in mats, if not ripped from his scalp by his captor or himself.

“You see what I can make a man into if it is my will?” Cortés lazily poked the Aztec with his sword so that the Indian danced, and shuffled, and whined.

No one dared answer, except for my slave, who muttered: “Repulsive.”

“Ssssshhhh!” I hissed.

Cortés continued to bellow: “Do you all see how I may transform even a great Emperor into a shambling fool?”

“Yes, my Lord,” one or two men finally admitted, the rest of us grumbling as Montezuma whispered prayers to his gods.

“Then hand over your gold, which is mine, by King Charles’s right as well as Christ’s,” Cortés ordered. “Or this Savage’s fate will also be your own.”

It took far more threats than these, but after much swinging about of his sword, the men feigned obedience. One complaining soldier after another tossed by the fire their red-gold Coins, Calendars, and ingenious Torture masks. They also handed over the Holy idols of the Aztecs’ fearsome dragonLord Quetzalcoatl, and those in the form of the half-man, half-dog Rain God of the Underworld, Xolotl.

Soon there was a magnificent pile and Cortés threw himself on top of it, caressing it with his hands, slobbering in victory.

You have heard two stories of what happened after this: One is that the men mutinied, and that after the blood-spree, hundreds of fleeing soldiers drowned in the rivers, their pockets filled with heavy deathly gold. In this version, Cortés is said to have escaped only with his life, whereas the largest portion of Montezuma’s treasure has been lost forever.

In the second version of the Tale, however, something quite more horrible came to pass.

It is said that as Cortés pawed the Indians’ golden idols of their Dragon-God Quetzalcoatl, and Were-Dog God Xolotl, King Montezuma rolled his eyes to the heavens and sang out an unearthly word, which could only have been a prayer summoning those devils.

“Mocuepa! Mocuepa!”

This cry filled me with a cold premonition, and I looked to see my Moorish Slave man instantly bathed by a solitary ray of the blood-Moon. His face turned up to the silver sky, while his mettle changed from that of a yellow-bellied Moor to Quetzalcoatl’s dragon-Vampyr:

“Aaaaaiiii!” he screamed.

Fangs grew from his jaws; his skin turned moth-pale; his fingers curled and sharpened like claws; filthy wings grew from his shoulders. Upon the completion of his metamorphosis he turned to me and roared:

“DIE!”

Rising in the air, Satan-quick, he sailed back down to bite me on the Neck. The Moor had long protested his enslavement. In his moonstruck Power, he sought to kill me in Retribution! But the germ he transferred made me stronger, whilst he weakened with the other fiend’s gift.

Thus I was infected. My body trembled, convulsed, and grew to the Freakish hairy dimensions of Xolotl the Dog-God. I lowered my Wolverine’s gaze to the helpless Spaniards, whom I commenced to kill in an ecstasy. Only the shrieking & nimbly fleeing Cortés escaped.

In the morning, I found my restored form now cauled in thick blood. The camp was littered with Gold & Gore, abandoned by all other living creatures save for my suncrippled Slave (for the Nosferatu have an allergy to Light), who begged me:

“Have mercy! Have mercy upon me!”

But I did not. I hastened the Treasure back to my Italian ship, which I had hidden from Cortés’s famous burning. First I clapped one of the Aztec’s gold Torture masks upon his face, as it would allow me to slowly starve the man whilst also guarding him from any energizing Moon. Then, months later, I landed in Venice; here my slave-man died in the dungeons. It was with both a jubilant heart, and the vampire-Moor’s gilded remains that I began the parlous journey back to Florence, buried the Slave in a plot by our crypt...only to then be exiled again by you.

Which of the Tales is true? You know the Answer, Cosimo, as you have called me
Versipellis
, having recognized me as a man who has shape-shifted into an Aztec Monster.

And so ends my letter, filled as it is with Tricks & Clues. Only if you study my words, and what lies beneath them, will you discover the Key to the mystery that waits for you in Rome. If so, your mettle will prove cleverer, and much less yellow than I supposed.

But in my Wolf heart, by the beating of my Wyvern’s blood, I hope you die on this next Quest.

Sincerely yours

Il Noioso Lupo Retto,

otherwise known as

Antonio.

Antonio says there are three clues in here, Erik—’
having survived to take up the challenges of City Three, you have earned that many additional hints’—
but I don’t see any.” He and I were closely inspecting this bizarre letter. “There’s something going on with these flowers, the illuminations. They form some kind of design.” We squinted down at them.

Erik’s eyes drooped slightly; he had begun to tire. As had I. “I don’t know what that is. But—look at this. It’s strange.”

He pointed to the letter’s closing lines:

“Sincerely yours

Il Noioso Lupo Retto,

otherwise known as

Antonio.”

“‘
Il Noioso Lupo Retto.’
There’s something funny about it...”

I wrapped one of my legs around his. “It means, ‘The Righteous, Tiresome Wolf.’”

“
Lupo
means ‘Wolf.’
Retto
—that’s ‘righteous.’”

“And then
noioso
means ‘boring’ or ‘tiresome.’ I think from the Latin
nausea
.”

“That’s weird.”

“That’s etymology for you.”

“No—I mean the phrasing of it. Calling himself that. It
sounds
weird. It doesn’t sound like the rest of the letter—even the line’s script is different.”

I looked closer. “You’re right.”

Erik deftly opened the side table’s drawer while remaining entangled with me. He extracted a pen and paper, and commenced scribbling.

“What are you doing?”

“I think it might be scrambled.”

“A word puzzle?”

“Yes. A palindrome—or an anagram. Because Antonio was an alchemist, his wife a spiritualist or witch. Right? Renaissance occultists were crazy as
loons
about acrostics. And Witches were supposed to compose these palindrome prayers—kind of early versions of the Beatles records—read from the front, they’d be homilies to Christ, but then, backward, they’d be invocations to the Devil. When I was younger, I went through a manic little anagram phase myself—I formed them out of my name all the time.

Erik Gomara
turns nicely into
Karma Ergo I
—sounds vaguely like a yoga position—and
I’m a Keg Roar,
which reminds me of some parties I attended in my youth. But the best one I ever thought up was
O magik rear,
which I thought sounded like a Wiccan description of my posterior region.”

“O magik rear?”

He yawned. “It’s so bad it’s good. But—before I pass out—help me out with the literal translation, here.”

Erik scratched his pen over the paper, writing Antonio’s closing and its English conversion: